Category: Narrative

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Narrative

The Children’s Hour

The classroom was a clamor of children’s voices, fairly bouncing off every surface. Once again Spruance Del Curtin wondered how he’d managed to get roped into this particular duty.

He knew all too well why — the kids were supposed to be going to the observatory for a basic science class. And kids this young were going to need more than just one or even two adults to keep them in good order on the trip up and back. So as Dr. Doorne’s special protege, he’d gotten roped into the task — and he sure couldn’t very well refuse, not when he really needed to keep on her good side.

However, the observatory was a geodesic dome of moonglass — one of the few surface features of the settlement to be part of its pressurized volume. With the Sun in such an unsettled state, even the solar filters were rather flimsy protection from radiation, especially for young children who were still growing.

So they were going to have a planetarium lesson instead, in the biggest room the science department had. Except for one big problem — the projector was still somewhere in the Astronomy Department’s storage rooms, thanks to a miscommunication, probably related to the change of plans.

It would’ve been so much easier if the teacher had just sent him up to the departmental offices to retrieve it. He actually knew his way around the Astronomy Department, unlike Ms. Cartwright, who just had some general science background and had been assigned the class because she was good with kids.

So here he was, stuck minding a bunch of little kids who were bored out of their minds. Worse, he’d had to arrange for one of the other guys to cover his air shift, and he was really missing it right now.

Especially considering that he was having to do this job with Rand Littleton. That kid was such an apple-polisher, and everyone favored him because he was a survivor of the ordeal in the downed lander. Never mind that it had been how many years now since the destruction of the old Luna Station, those kids always got cut slack on everything.

And Rand had been “one of the little kids” back then. The biggest reason he’d gotten so much responsibility was that one of the geologists had made him her protege.

And I don’t dare complain too much about it because her husband’s one of my clone-brothers. Sprue still remembered how Doyle had dressed him down. No, he had no desire for a repetition, and just because the pilots were all quarantined down at Flight Ops for now didn’t mean they would be forever.

And we Sheps have long memories.

At least keeping the kids corralled didn’t leave much time for anything else, so he didn’t have to make conversation with Rand. And quite honestly, Rand was a whole lot better with kids than he was. Rand always had that knack for finding ways to amuse little kids.

And here came Ms. Cartwright, projector in hand. At least she had a good idea that Sprue would know how to set it up, so he didn’t have to sit there trying to keep the kids quiet while she fumbled her way through the process.

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Beyond the Horizon

Every time Drew closed his eyes, he kept seeing the lunar horizon stretching out before him. Maybe it was just because he didn’t feel so hemmed in when he was flying.

Even back at Slayton Field, the restrictions were getting tighter as the close calls kept accumulating. At first they just hadn’t been allowed to go into the main part of Grissom City, but they were allowed to mix freely with the support staff. Now they were under orders to remain in their quarters when they weren’t actively working on something that took them to a particular place.

And it’s interesting how many people suddenly get a whole lot more interested in simulator time. Half the pilots wouldn’t put in any more than the essential time, and now we’re all practically fighting for our turns on those machines.

Here, it would be much harder to argue for simulator time, or pretty much anything that would get him out of this tiny BOQ cubicle. Sure, they’d set up a place for visitations, but the kids had been more frustrated than happy at seeing Daddy through a thick plate of moonglass, so he and Brenda had agreed that it would be just as well to just visit via FaceTime on their tablets, which they could do no matter where he was.

Which meant there was nothing to do but wait until Brenda called. And in the meantime, he had documentation he really needed to be looking over. Even amidst a pandemic and a solar storm watch, he needed to keep up with his secondary astronaut specialty.

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So Close and Yet So Far Away

Drew’s back in town. Brenda wished she could really feel excited about it the way she ought to.

But it couldn’t change the fact that he couldn’t really come home, not as long as there was any question of pilots catching the diablovirus in one spaceport and then bringing it home to spread through the close quarters of a lunar settlement. Even if she took the kids down to Flight Operations to see their daddy, the closest they were going to come was seeing him through a thick moonglass window and talk over a glorified speakerphone. They could just as well FaceTime on her tablet and spare themselves the time and effort of going down to Innsmouth Sector.

Or at least that had been the plan. Instead, Brenda had gotten a call that there had been some problems with some of the air handlers up in Miskatonic Sector, and the crew needed someone slim and flexible to get into the plenum leading to them.

She couldn’t very well disappoint her dad, so she’d left the kids with a friend while she dealt with the latest emergency. At least the last two CME’s have shot off in the direction of Jupiter, so we’ve had a reprieve there, even if we are still under the solar storm watch.

Still, the work was pretty routine, and left her far too much time for thought. Like recollections of when she and Drew had first met, in those wild and crazy days right after the destruction of Luna Station. He’d been such a hero, trekking overland from a downed lander to get help for his commander, who’d been injured in the damage that had put them down there.

Her folks had been a little concerned about her getting involved with someone who was several years older. However, they hadn’t quite gone to the point of forbidding her any contact with Drew, just pointed out that she had three more months until her eighteenth birthday, and needed to remember that.

And then he managed to get a lander down on manual after the flight computer got corrupted in the cyber-attack, and everyone’s attitudes changed.

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Peering into the Mists of Time

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with Lou Corlin. But after Dr. Doorne had given him a totally new group of data sets, he wanted to talk to Lou where they’d have ready access to the heavy iron.

Especially if this is part of something that IT’s processing.

Lou was back in one of the big server rooms, busy at a terminal of some sort. He looked up as soon as Sprue walked in.

Lou’s dark eyebrows drew down in a scowl. “Who sent you back here? This area is supposed to be authorized personnel only.”

Sprue jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the corridor. “The girl out front said you were back here. She didn’t say anything about having to wait while she got you.” He pointedly didn’t add that he’d spent several minutes flattering her before asking Lou’s whereabouts, buttering her up so she’d be more likely to let him through.

“Dang, Julie’s brand new down here. You do realize you may have just gotten her in a whole lot of trouble, if Steffi comes around and finds you back here with me. These are supposed to be secure servers that handle sensitive information. They don’t even have direct Internet connections. If we have random people coming and going, we don’t have secure servers any more because someone could just help themselves to the data.”

“Crap. I didn’t realize it was that big a deal. I just wanted to ask you about some data Dr. Doorne was having me work on. The stuff she had been having me go through is pretty clearly demographic, and I think it has something to do with the pandemic. But this stuff is completely different. I mean, the fundamental structure of the data is different.” Sprue described some of the variables that he’d been working with.

“That sounds like astronomical data. The drives that came in from Mars on the Soryu must’ve finally cleared quarantine and been cleared–“

“Data from Mars? What would she be doing with that? I mean, she’s a radio astronomer, not a planetary geologist.”

“Hasn’t she told you anything about her work? She’s one of the principal researchers in a big study that’s using FSRA and the new radio array on Mars as a truly gigantic baseline radio telescope. It’s a really complicated thing that has to adjust for general and special relativity to pull all the data together, so her background in signals analysis is absolutely critical. They’re hoping to be able to detect objects further away than ever before, and thanks to the speed of light, that means further into the past. If they’re right, they may be able to sort the last echoes of the first few mintues after the Big Bang from the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang itself, and determine if the universe is actually part of a multiverse of universes that interact at the quantum level.”

“Wow. That sounds pretty cool.”

“Which is why you’d better get out of here, now, if you don’t want to get kicked off all her projects with a big fat black mark on your permanent record. Come over to our module lounge after supper tonight and I’ll tell you more.”

Although Sprue didn’t like being dismissed, especially not by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group, he could tell that persisting would only risk attracting attention. So he took his leave as gracefully as he could manage, hoping it wasn’t too obvious just how intense a curiosity was burning inside his mind right now.

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Ripples

At the receptionist’s desk, Cindy Margrave tried not to pay too much attention as Autumn Belfontaine walked Colonel Hearne to the door. It was a gesture of courtesy — he certainly knew how to get back out of the station offices by himself. But honor was due to the commander of the last flight of the Falcon, who’d kept the crippled orbiter’s crew alive until the Incomparable Nekrasov could rescue them with Baikal.

Right now they were just making small talk, pleasantries that offered no clue about why the chief of Flight Operations should need to talk to the station’s news director. Cindy caught something about University of Minnesota, from which both of them had graduated, albeit decades apart. Probably just a reminiscence of some feature of the campus that loomed large in both their memories.

It’s probably just as well he didn’t come up here during Spruance Del Curtain’s shift. Sprue’s the sort of guy who sees something like this as a challenge to get around social conventions to find out what’s gong on.

And he’d gotten in trouble over those antics more than once. It probably didn’t help that he tended to view himself as the smartest guy in the room, and figure he could find a way around restrictions. It was an attitude that had probably put the kibosh on any chance of his ever being selected for pilot training, and it was a wonder he hadn’t been kicked off the station staff.

Although he had been more subdued lately, ever since he started doing that project for Dr. Doorne. Which reminded Cindy that she had a project of her own to finish. The sales director wanted her to do a research project for him, and she still had a lot of work to do. With less than an hour left on her shift, she needed to buckle down and get focused.

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In the Shadow of Uncertainty

Autumn Belfontaine had not expected to get a visit from the head of Flight Operations. She knew that Bill Hearne had been a friend of her father’s, but her father had died before she was even born.

And there’s a lot of survivor guilt there. Colonel Hearne was commanding American Eagle during the NASA Massacre.

But here he was, visiting in person rather than just texting or e-mailing his questions. Autumn was getting the impression that it was a personal matter and he didn’t want records of it to be on any official NASA systems.

Which made her wish she could give him some better information. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting a whole lot of information either. A lot of the wire services have gone down, especially the Web-based ones. Even the AP and Reuters have been spotty, and I’m thinking they’ve lost a lot of their correspondents. Quite honestly, I’m getting better information from the websites of the various local radio and TV stations, especially if I’m trying to move beyond the big cities.”

That got her a nod. “Alice has been following the radio stations in the area she grew up, checking their farm reports to try to get an idea of what’s going on up there.”

Autumn recalled that Colonel Hearne’s wife had grown up on a wheat farm near Duluth. The age difference between them had imposed a distance that their both being Minnesotans and graduates of U of Minnesota couldn’t quite bridge. “I’d been following Radio K, at least until they switched to some kind of automated format after the university sent everyone home. Some of the on-air personalities have been updating their blogs, but even that’s gotten hit-and-miss.”

She paused, realized she was hesitating because what she wanted to say was a shift from reporting to editorializing. Even in a private communication like this, the distinction’s too deeply ingrained. “To be very honest, I’m concerned about just how spotty news coverage has become, and what it bodes for the future. Eventually the pandemic will have to burn itself out for the simple reason that it can no longer spread rapidly enough to sustain itself. But what will even be left by that point?”

“That’s what we’ve been thinking about too. So far NASA’s been able to hold itself together, but I’m hearing a lot of rumint from people I know down there that the cities have gotten pretty hard hit, and they’re concerned about the situation with critical infrastructure and manufacturing. I don’t know how familiar you are with industrial processes, but there are a lot of them that you can’t just turn off and back on like a light switch.”

“I covered some blackouts when I was still on Earth, so yes, I have some idea of what kinds of problems can happen when backup systems fail. Down there, they just don’t build in the redundancy we have up here, and it looks like it’s going to be biting a lot of people in the butt.” Autumn paused. “However, we’re speculating here, trying to extrapolate from way too little data. Which is a dangerous thing for news people to do.”

“Understood.” Bill Hearne pulled himself back to his feet. “Given those limitations, I won’t use up any more of your time. Thank you for letting me know what you do have.”

“And I’ll make sure to let you know if I get anything new.”

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A Touch of Home

Bill Hearne had just finished dropping off the two terabyte drives full of transportation data at the Astronomy Department office and was heading back to his office in Flight Operations when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it out and was astonished to find a text from his brother Frank on the lock screen.

Are you where you can talk?

I’m on the way back to my office. What’s going on?

We’ve been pretty much isolated for the last several weeks. Word from Madison is essential travel only, minimize contact with persons outside your household while making necessary trips. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to the feed truck or milk truck drivers when they do show up, so I’m not getting even that gossip.

Hardly surprising, from everything Bill had been hearing of late. Although that was getting more and more spotty, since his pilots were under similar restrictions. As much as possible, they were supposed to stay in their spacecraft and let the robots pick up any cargo. Since all radio circuits were monitored and recorded, it did put a damper on the sort of scuttlebutt that pilots engaged in while visiting other settlements or Luna Station.

So you’re wondering what I’m hearing about the rest of the three worlds.

I was hoping you’d know something. All I know is what we see on the news, and a lot of it feels pretty canned. Out here we just don’t have the bandwidth to stream Internet radio, or I’d tune in to your station.

Bill could appreciate that. When he was a kid growing up, the old home place was still on a party line. You always had to carefully pick up the phone and check to see if anyone else was on before you started dialing. His sister Kate had gotten in trouble a couple of times, getting home from school and being so eager to start calling all her friends that she didn’t notice one of the neighbors was already talking and just started dialing.

They’d gone to private lines some time after he graduated college, while he was on his first tour of duty. He’d gotten back to the States and came home on leave to discover the change the hard way. He’d needed to call one of the neighbors — he didn’t even remember why — and had automatically held down the flashhook while dialing, the way you had to on a party line, only to discover it wouldn’t go through.

Even after the Internet became a Thing for civilians, it had taken over a decade before the nearest dialup ISP number was a local call. Not that he was going to hook up any Air Force or NASA-issued laptop to an unsecured line, but being able to e-mail his family would’ve made keeping in touch a lot easier during the Energy Wars, at least while he wasn’t flying secret military missions like the one he’d been commanding the day of the NASA Massacre.

I don’t know if being able to stream our broadcasts would give you all that much more information than you’re getting on TV. Bill considered just how much he wanted to tell his brother. With everything in such a fragile state, the wrong information, or even just something out of context, could be worse than nothing. Especially considering that Frank needed to focus on keeping the family farms running, it wouldn’t do to go spilling his own concerns. Right now we’re pretty limited in our sources, or so the news director’s said.

Got it. Take care up there, big brother.

Will do. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued on his way. Right now neither of them could do anything to help the other’s situation, so perhaps it was best that they didn’t have much in the way of details. Enough that they each knew the other was reasonably all right.

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Other Kinds of Traffic

Having finished studying, but not yet ready to hit the sack, Payton Shaw was taking a quick look through his social media. It split about 50/50 between the purely personal and that pertaining to his role as an on-air personality at Shepardsport Pirate Radio.

I really need to get some of this stuff updated. Of course the fact that his show was weekly rather than daily meant that he just didn’t have as much material for his professional pages as DJ’s like the Timeline Brothers or Spruance Del Curtin.

A voice calling his name pulled him out of his thoughts. Payton looked up to find Quinn Merton standing just behind him. “So you’re going through your social media too.

“Yeah, and I was trying to remember when traffic started slacking off. I mean, things have been kinda busy lately,” he decided not to mention the research he’d been doing after Colonel Hearne had left him with a puzzle, “so I wasn’t keeping as close of track. Things change slowly enough and you don’t really notice it until it gets big enough that you say hey, when did it happen?”

“How hard would it be to get actual traffic data on that stuff? I know Lou Corlin works down at IT, so he might be able to get some logs. And Spruance Del Curtin’s working on some kind of super-secret project for Dr. Doorne, and he got picked because he was in her statistics class.”

Payton considered that information. “Lou would be easy to approach, but if he doesn’t think he ought to be handing out that information, he’s going to be tough to convince. Sprue’s just the opposite. Aloof as a cat, but if you want to get him to do something for you, make it into a challenge and he’ll knock himself out to beat everyone else to it.”

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A Worrisome Situation

After her conversation with Dr. Doorne about statistics and metrics, Betty Margrave was feeling a lot less reassured about the present situation. Which was why she had decided it was time to talk to Bill Hearne.

When she’d first contacted him, she was thinking in terms of meeting him in his office down at Flight Operations. However, he was concerned about holding a routine consultation down there. Yes, there was the concern about infectuous agents, whether on an object that had not been properly sterilized or by someone who had contact with an infected person. But there was also the problem of Flight Operations being somewhat in disarray right now, what with all the pilots having to be quarantined down here instead of going home to their families.

There had been a moment of awkwardness, given that Betty was married to a pilot-astronaut who was currently sitting down there in the BOQ. Sure, they could FaceTime each other, but they could do it when he was in any spaceport all over the Moon.

But Betty wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Bill was only able to go home to Alice every night right now because he’d reached mandatory retirement age for pilots, and had taken over the top job in Flight Ops so that Colonel Carlyle could be freed up to fly full-time again instead of squeezing in a minimum of flight time among ground duties.

So here they were in the Safety and Security conference room, which had been set up specifically so S&S personnel could meet with people who were not cleared to deal with private information. In many ways going the other way would’ve been easier for the reason that Flight Ops very rarely dealt with material that could not be generally disseminated, and what little they did have (some classified military projects and the occasional medical issue) could easily be sequestered from general meeting spaces.

They had been talking mostly about spacelift, and how both the raw numbers and the distribution of spaceflights had changed since the beginning of the diablovirus pandemic. Somehow the subject had drifted to transportation in general, and how much it was changing. Betty knew that the cruise ships and casual airline travel had been shut down almost as soon as it became clear that they were dealing with something deadly. She’d also heard anecdotal reports about varying levels of restriction on personal mobility, from “stay at home orders” that were on the level of polite requests to blockades and arrests, even one story of a person being shot for breaking quarantine.

Where had that been? Bill averred that he’d heard it, but couldn’t recall exactly where. He wanted to say Germany, but both of them agreed that it was unwise to let past history do their thinking for them, especially in the absence of solid facts. For all they knew, it was a hypothetical that got turned into a friend-of-a-friend story courtesy of social media.

But by the time they were finished, he had agreed that it was time to pull together as much transportation data they could find and see what Dr. Doorne’s number-crunchers could make of it.

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Baby Steps

Dr. Thuc was reviewing the latest CDC updates, which she’d downloaded in full onto her workstation just in case they got a solar storm strong enough to disrupt Internet connections with whatever server they were on. Although she thought the MedCenter over at Grissom City kept copies on their servers, it was still possible that communications between the two settlements could be disrupted.

She was concentrating so intensely that she almost didn’t hear her phone chime incoming text. It was only on the second chime that she realized someone was texting her, that it might be urgent.

She picked up the phone and was surprised to discover that it was Vitali Grigorenko from Gagarinsk. I have some interesting information for you.

Her first thought was what kind of interesting? However, it would be rude to ask so bluntly, even if she was wondering if it were interesting in a bad way.

Thank you. What kind of information are we looking at?

Grigorenko took a little time to respond. English wasn’t his native tongue, even if he was a Grissom — he’d been kidnapped right out of Riley Children’s Hospital hours after birth by KGB agents, and had grown up speaking Russian. Which was what made teleconferences with him such an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

And then the text appeared: I have some connections in Ministry of Health and Imperial Academy of Science. They have passed me some material that indicate Academician Voronsky has success in sequencing DNA of diablovirus. I know Autumn Belfontaine has asked about this, but I want to send it to you first.

Yes, that was probably wise. Autumn was a professional journalist, and she might decide to run it past a medical professional before making any public announcement. However, with everyone desperate for even a glimmer of hope, she might let eagerness overcome her better judgment and release the story immediately.

Before she could even start a reply, a second text came through: Can you receive large attachment to e-mail, or should I give you URL for file to download?

After a bit of technical back-and-forth, they determined it would probably be best to go the URL route. As it happened, Grigorenko already had the file on a server up at Gagarinsk, and it was just a matter of changing the permissions so she could access it and then giving her the URL.

As soon as she got the file downloaded and opened — at least it was in a format her software could deal with, instead of one peculiar to Russian operating systems — she realized that she would need some help reading it. Although she did have a reasonable acquaintance with the Russian language, and with medical terminology in Russian, it didn’t extend to some of the technical aspects of genetics, which had developed somewhat differently behind the old Iron Curtain, back in the days when genetic engineering and human cloning were still burn-before-reading secret in both East and West.

Still, she made sure to let Grigorenko know that she’d successfully downloaded it and thank him for thinking of her.